Clouds and virtualization, sure, but what about shadow IT groups?

Is there a catch?

Talk about your business risks...

Today's announcement from Amazon of Glacier  vindicates the point I made here , that the pricing model of cloud storage services such as S3 ...

CrashPlan acquits itself well against Carbonite, Mozy, and the rest.

SpiderOak is a cloud storage provider that tries to address privacy concerns  …

Cloud based project management for research LIMS and ELN. SaaS for fast adoption, easy transition, lower costs, always available

If you've ever wanted to drop terms like EC2 and S3 into casual conversation ( …

Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which could benefit from cloud  deployment to a greater or lesser extent. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks  which benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources to day-to-day collaborative activities  which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks  such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer  bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the  service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are  performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternative, e.g.,  private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity  and economies of scale. Infrastructure as a Service model may provide a basis on which more  specialised software services may be provided.   There is considerable work to be done in helping institutions understand the cloud and its  associated costs, risks and benefits, and how these compare to their current working methods,  in order that the most beneficial uses of cloud technologies may be identified. Specific  proposals, echoing recent work coordinated by EPSRC and JISC are the  development of  advisory, costing and brokering services to facilitate appropriate cloud deployments, the  exploration of opportunities for  certifying or accrediting cloud preservation providers, and  the targeted publicity of outputs from pilot studies to the full range of stakeholders within the  curation lifecycle, including data creators and owners, repositories, institutional IT support  professionals and senior managers

Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service has outperformed Microsoft's Windows Azure  …

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

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There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.

Dropbox faces security advocates angry over marketing exaggeration and technology choices

I've been looking at the problems of specifying, measuring  and auditing (PDF)  the reliability of storage technologies since 2006 . When I ...